3rd July 2014 – A Great Day SOTAing on “Gun” and “The Cloud”

We set off from Sheffield about noon, for another afternoon / evening of amateur radio activity by going to go and ‘Activate’ the Summits on the Air (SOTA) summits of “Gun” G/SP-013 and “the Cloud” G/SP-015. These are quite easy summits to Activate there is only a short walk from where you can park a car to the top of the summit, having said that, by the time I packed all the kit in my Rucksack, I was very glad to take it off when I reached the Summit.

The plan was for my friend and fellow SOTA activator Denis (M0USV), to operate on HF 20m, I was going to operate on 6m SSB using my halo antenna. Between us we would fill in on 2m FM and SSB.

For both of us it was a day about quality QSOs , not quantity. I had a nice QSO down to Italy, I just love doing this on 5w QRP, the station at the other end was running several hundred watts.

The Trig point on Gun

One of the things which I feel a number of people miss out on with SOTA is its not all about climbing Summits, when we do, we need people to talk to. In SOTA terms these are called Chasers many unfortunately don’t log into the SOTA Database and log their contacts, by not doing this they are missing awards too.